The present invention relates generally to user operated office group machines, and more particularly to a user operated group machine time slot reservation and management system for enabling efficient and economical management of the time of the machine, and of potential users of such the machine in a group work environment.
User operated office machines such as copiers, copier/printers, fax or facsimile machines, binders and the like, are of course well known. The most popular and frequently demanded such office machines are copiers and copier/printers, which generally are referred to as reprographic, or copy making machines. Typically in an office environment where a group of potential users of such a machine work, it is a common practice to locate such a user operated machine (that is a User Operated Group Machine) in a common area away from each potential user's actual work area.
Nowadays, it also common for each user among the group of potential users to be set in a reprographic system that includes the User Operated Group Machine (UOGM) and a personal computer (PC) work station.
A typical reprographic machine or copier is an office machine that includes a light lens, and in which a paper original image is in fact photographed. To do so, the original image is focused onto an area of a photoreceptor, which is subsequently developed with toner into a toner image on the photoreceptor. The toner image on the photoreceptor is subsequently transferred to a copy sheet and fused thereon to create a permanent hard copy of the original image.
A more recent type of reprographic machine, copier, copier printer is known as a digital copier or printing machine, and usually includes a smart controller or CPU. In its most basic functions, the digital copier or printing machine performs the same functions as a light lens copier, except that the original image to be copied is not directly focused on a photoreceptor. Instead, with a digital copier or printer, the original image is received electronically from a remote source such as a personal computer (PC) work station, or is scanned by an image scanning device generally known as a raster input scanner (RIS) including an array of photosensors. The original image is focused on the photosensors in the RIS. The photosensors convert the various light and dark areas of the original image to a set of digital signals. These digital signals may be temporarily retained in a memory and then eventually used to operate the digital printing machine or copier when it is desired to print copies of the original.
Another recent type of a user operated group machine is a digital multi-function machine which merely a single machine that provides the user with more than one function. An example of a typical multi-function machine would include a digital copy function; a digital printing function, and a digital facsimile function.
Because of the noise such User Operated Group machines make, they are typically located in an enclosed area with office cubicle height partitions around them, or in a separate room away from each of the potential users in the office group.
Users cannot always stand in front of the machine (UOGM) and wait for a long job being run to finish. None the potential users in a work group area likes to walk all the way to a machine for the purpose of operating it to run a job, only to find out when he/she gets there that somebody else was already at the machine an operating it to run perhaps a very long job. These two scenarios constitute significant inefficient abuses of user/operator time. In addition, there is and can also be inefficient use of machine and operator time whenever the machine while running a long job in the absence of an operator runs out of paper or suffers a jam. Often this is discovered only when the operator or user returns to the machine to pick up the copies of the long job only to realize then that the job had stopped some time ago due to a paper jam, an out of paper condition or a document misfeed.
There is therefore a need for a group machine Time Slot Reservation and management system that effectively enables efficient and economical management of the time of a User Operated Group machine, and that of potential users of such a machine in a group work environment.